


turning the grace

by dissembler



Category: Another Country (1984)
Genre: Blood and Injury, Fighting, Light Masochism, M/M, Period-Typical Homophobia, Pseudo Self-Harm, Themes of Punishment, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-30
Updated: 2021-01-30
Packaged: 2021-03-16 22:54:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,768
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29090106
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dissembler/pseuds/dissembler
Summary: Fowler loses.
Relationships: Guy Bennett/Fowler
Comments: 2
Kudos: 7
Collections: Chocolate Box - Round 6





	turning the grace

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sandrine Shaw (Sandrine)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sandrine/gifts).



> Title is from Jude 1:4: For there are certain men crept in unawares, who were before of old ordained to this condemnation, ungodly men, turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness, and denying the only Lord God, and our Lord Jesus Christ.
> 
> Happy Chocolate Box! Hope you enjoy!

_I, virtue… must be enthroned in your heart; I must have the absolute government_  
_of your physical, intellectual, moral being; I must regulate your life;_  
_I must direct you in your going out and your coming in; I must have the_  
_control of your thoughts, feelings, words and deeds…_  
Hugh Stowell Brown, ‘Manliness: A Lecture’ 1858

It’s a hot night. Oppressive. The conditions now are the closest, he imagines, that England can get to the muggy heat of those colonies in the East. Fowler endures it as he sets about a patrol of the grounds, sees the heat as a test or a lesson. If he strives, and he shall, he can succeed in beating this or any weather and come to the forces a finely turned out soldier, a man for all climates.

A model recruit, a perfect officer in waiting. His record would be faultless if it weren’t for Bennett and Jacker Pot, and Martineaux casting his shadow over Gascoigne’s. At least, should this be mentioned, he can say that it was not he that let the tone slip. He’ll be proving that until he leaves. He’ll keep ever more vigilant a watch.

It’s not wholly dark, there’s moonlight and the lamps are lit; Fowler sticks to the very edges of the paths, close to the trees and bushes, so that any man out of bounds shan’t set eyes upon him until it’s too late. He’s not seen anyone about yet, but there had been a bed empty in the dormitories. He’s just thinking about how much time he can give up to the hunt out here before he’ll go back in to check the school buildings when he sees a figure on the bridge, leaning against the side.

It’s tall, dark headed, with an insolent line to a body from which hangs a standard dressing gown. It’s Bennett, it must be. Yet another beatable infraction and what’s worse is how shameless he is in it; he’s not even _hiding_. 

He waits to see what Bennett’s about before he marches up and confronts him. It flashes for a moment in his mind that perhaps, like Martineaux, Bennett is looking for the coward’s way out, but there doesn’t seem to be despair in the way he holds himself. Rather, he looks a man deep in thought and worse. He looks like a man who owns the place. He leans against the balustrade like a _God_. 

A tick of pain shoots down his neck and Fowler consciously unclenches his jaw. Bennett has not moved, in his own world of gazing, and Fowler traces his line of sight to the moored punts.

Of course, he remembers, the boats were Bennett’s meeting place with the man from Longford’s, he’d read it in the damning note. Knowing that the look is probably wistful, openly so, makes his blood boil and, ready now to strike, he looks back up only to find Bennett gone. 

As he advances, slow and quiet, he finds at least that Bennett hasn’t gone far. He’s merely moved off the bridge and down onto the grass at the bank, still looking at the blasted boats. Fowler stays silent as he gets over the bridge but, sportingly, he stands straight and treads firmly as he comes up on Bennett.

Bennett barely looks up. “Oh, it’s you,” he says, hardly paying attention. “I’m afraid I was miles away, reminiscing on happier times.”

Fowler scoffs at that and Bennett finally looks up at him properly, eyes clearing of whatever despicable thing he had been remembering so fondly.

“Were you following me long?” Bennett fixes him with an assessing look. He purses his lips. “I wonder what you were hoping to see.”

“Don’t be vile, Bennett. Does your licentiousness know no bounds?”

Bennett’s eyes widen mockingly. “‘ _Licentiousness_.’ There’s a big word. Are you sure you know what it means?”

Fowler feels his face heat as he scowls. “Don’t be stupid, of course I do.”

Bennett holds his gaze, expectant.

Not that he has anything to prove to Bennett, of all people, but he supplies the definitions anyway – “Prurient. Vulgar. Obscene. Deviant,” – and hopes that one of them might make Bennett rightly ashamed.

Instead there are spots of colour on Bennett’s cheeks now, his mouth is just parted and his lower lip full and shining.

Fowler digs his nails into the meat of his palms at his sides. “ _Lustful_ ,” he says with finality. Chief among Bennett’s sins and simmering like a disease under the surface of the school.

Bennett blinks at him, a revolting show of girlish innocence which he ruins immediately by grinning. “Oh do go on, Fowler. I must say I found all that rather exciting. You know just how to say those lovely things.”

“You know,” Bennett continues, “you’re not so clean of vice yourself. Pride’s a vice.” He brings up a hand and starts ticking them off on his long, thin fingers. “Hunger for power, that’s certainly a vice. And then,” his eyes drop below Fowler’s waist, and Fowler seethes. “Then of course there’s the obvious.”

Hands trembling with rage, Fowler bites out, “Bennett, I shall have you beaten.”

Bennett gives a whoop of laughter, clapping his hands together. “Yes, that’s the one. And of course, envy is a vice. I had wondered whether you’d manage to enjoy my beating after all, seeing as it was Delahay who administered it.”

He tries to hold himself perfectly still, to maintain his own discipline. “You needed the punishment and you got it. It hardly matters who meted it out.”

Bennett’s look turns skeptical. “I don’t think that’s true. I think you enjoy it. You thrill to have the cane in your hand, to hear the cries of the helpless boy beneath you–”

Fowler goes for him then, the edges of his vision creeping in and his heart thudding in his ears. He strides across the distance, taking Bennett down with a shove and wasting no time in hailing closed-fisted blows down upon him. 

Sounding winded, Bennett does manage to work an arm down to shield his stomach and on the third blow Fowler’s knuckles end up connecting hard with an elbow. He hisses and withdraws, closing his aching hand around a bony wrist and wrenching it up to pin it in the earth beside Bennett’s head. Bennett keeps struggling, though, and he contorts his trapped hand to scratch at Fowler’s, distracting him enough to land his own vicious punch in Fowler’s side. 

He huffs at the blow and brings his knee up to jab under Bennett’s ribs in answer. Bennett makes a high, wounded noise and curls up, swearing, his free hand coming round to clutch at his belly. Fowler snatches that wrist too, has both his hands pinning Bennett’s when Bennett’s own knee comes up with an obvious target, a dirty trick to try. He dodges it and in anger he lets go of Bennett’s wrists and goes for his neck.

It’s mostly open, Bennett’s pyjama shirt, and so Fowler takes a hold of the dressing gown collar instead. He can still feel it, anyway; Bennett’s skin is fever hot, damp from the sultry heat and the exertion, his blood pounding wildly under Fowler’s hands. 

Bennett’s eyes are watering, his lip is bloody where he must have bitten it in pain. The red fog recedes and Fowler comes back to himself staring at the purplish swell of it. His grip loosens minutely, horror dawning, and the narrowing of Bennett’s eyes is the only warning he gets, even that not enough. 

He doesn’t see it coming at all. Bennett surges up and seals his mouth to his in some awful mockery of a kiss. 

Horrified, Fowler lurches back, scrambling in the grass to get away as Bennett jumps up and, with one quick look back at him, a line of blood now dripping from the corner of his mouth, he runs away into the trees, hands pressed to his side.

He stares at the crushed grass in front of him, hand up and covering his mouth too late. He thinks about following. He thinks about getting up and pursuing, taking Bennett by the arm, as he ought to have before any of this had happened, and marching him back to the house, to deal with him properly in the morning but he can’t do that now. He can’t take a bruised man, a bleeding man, back to the house and expect to gain anything from it, or not to lose because of it. 

Dragging his hand down away from his face he sees the marks on it from Bennett’s gouging at him. Mechanically, he lifts his other hand and fits his fingertips to the pattern. He presses down, sealing his lips so as not to make a sound and watching as the skin around his nails blanches then red wells up and runs down his wrist to stain his cuff. 

Marks of Cain, he thinks. The wounds, the blood, the ache in his side and the stains on his clothing, they all mark him out as having done wrong.

The throbbing of his half-hard prick marks him out as a monster.

Disgust fills him up, sends itself coursing through his veins, threatening to choke him from the inside. He digs his fingers harder into the wet warmth of his cuts, slicing with his nails until the pain burns white enough to be a penance. He cannot beat himself, not here, not with only the privacy afforded by the outdoors. He cannot even be certain that he’s alone for this minor flagellation, thinks of Bennett watching him from the trees.

His bleeding hand cannot be enough; it should stop the awful things that appear in his mind but it doesn’t. He is imagining that Bennett had never tried the dirty trick of kissing him. That Bennett is still pinned beneath him, his bleeding mouth an ‘o’ shaped wound. He sees himself taking his aching prick in hand and leaving an altogether different kind of mark on Bennett and he lurches forward with an anguished noise, tugging at his trousers to wrap his bloody hand around himself and pull, brutally, until he has purged this filth from his system.

After, he prays, and after that he stands and slips back into the school, changing into his pyjamas and hiding his soiled linen within the pile of others’. 

He cannot punish Bennett now, perhaps he never can again, but there are only a few weeks until he leaves this place for Sandhurst. Among the drills and orders he must believe that he will forget.


End file.
